This
paper was prepared for an oral presentation given on the
archaeological site of Presquile Plantation at Bermuda Hundred,
Virginia in the mid 1990s.
This edition of The Virginia Housewife with notes and comments by Karen Hess is the most authoritative version available today, and it is far superior to the scores of facsimile editions.
The first regional cookbook in America
was Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife. Published in
1824, the book is an absolute marvel and a monument to one of
history’s great cooks. I think of it as the first truly American
cook book. Mrs. Randolph was married to David Meade Randolph.
“Davies,” as he was called, grew up at Curles Plantation, and I
have no doubt he was nourished on foods and medicines prepared in the
Curles kitchen from recipes like those from a manuscript known as
Jane Randolph Her Book--a typical 18th-century
plantation woman's recipe book begun by Davies' grandmother.
Mary was born into the highly
privileged Cary-Randolph clan, among the wealthiest 1% of the colony,
in the mid-18th century, but she was also a child of the
Enlightenment and of the tumultuous changes of the revolutionary
period. The Early Republic world of David and Mary Randolph lay
cleanly on the other side of Revolution and Enlightenment, and in
many ways, it represents what I like to call "The Other
Revolution." This other revolution was economic, in that
economic power rapidly changed from the planter elite to merchants
and industrial capitalists. It was geographic, in that the focus of
culture and power moved from the rural seats of a few privileged
families to the urban milieu of the new world of business. It was
cultural in that urban values quickly supplanted rural ones, and
revolutionary ideas of equality and liberty came to be applied--at
least for a few decades--to woman and even in some cases to slaves.
Many more woman left the inner sanctum of domesticity and entered
into the public domain, becoming economic and political forces of
some substance. Many black slaves were manumitted in the heady days
following the Revolution, and the rising middle class and huge influx
of immigrants transformed American culture almost overnight. Mary’s
and David’s lives were very different from those of their
grandparents' generation, and Mary’s cookbook is not merely a
19th-century published version of a Colonial receipt book.
Mary and David lived for many years at
Presquile Plantation in what appears to have been a kind of tranquil
gentility following the Revolution. Her husband was her first cousin.
Cousin marriage was the typical pattern of the Randolphs and other
ruling families of 18th-c Virginia, because by marrying
within the clan, the vast resources of land and slaves were not
scattered to heirs of diverse lineages. David was a son of the second
Richard Randolph of Curles. Richard purchased the Presquile tract,
built a small but elegant Georgian manor house here, and presented it
to his son and daughter-in-law upon their marriage. The Battle of
Yorktown had not yet been fought and Benedict Arnold was soon to
encamp at Bermuda Hundred, but plantation life went on as it had for
a century.
The planter elite had some competition
from merchants---especially Scots and Scotch-Irish merchants. While
planters attracted merchant ships and consumers to their plantation
wharves, the merchants competed for the trade in cities such as
Richmond and Petersburg and in regional river market towns like
Bermuda Hundred. The Randolph's chief competitor here was Jonathon
Hylton, and, subsequently, his son Daniel. Archaeological evidence
from their home indicated that they vied not only for a larger share
of the marketing business, dominated by the Randolphs in this area,
but also for their share of the planters' cultural prestige.
David Meade Randolph, like his cousin
Jefferson, was highly influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment. He
was an inventor, a scientist of sorts, and an entrepreneur in various
industrial enterprises. He invested heavily in the cities. He took on
a partnership with one of the top Scots merchants in Richmond--David
Ross--to start a major flour-milling industry. He was not content to
sit on his farm as a patron of his bucolic rural dominion, because he
apparently could see that there was an economic and cultural
revolution in the air as well as a political one. Evidence suggests
that his relationship with his wife, Mary--known to her friends and
family as "Molly"--was much more one of equals than was the
tradition. Davies enjoyed a reputation here at Presquile as a
scientifically-minded experimenter. He was even called the "best
farmer" in the land. But Molly was not simply the household
manager. It appears her influence extended into the business, if not
the science, of farming at Presquile.
Historian Rhys Isaac has done an
especially good job of describing the relations of debt that seem to
have knit together Virginia society in the 18th century. The planters
remained hugely indebted to their merchant factors in England and
Scotland, while local middling and small planters remained
perpetually indebted to the great planters like the Randolphs. These
debts were never fully repaid, but, rather, it was the indebtedness
that caused small farmers to be obligated to great planters, and the
planters, in turn, to be obligated to their British factors.
The Revolutionary War was largely
financed by the great Virginia planters, and one of the worries of
the other colonies was that, in the new republic, these rich
Virginians would have entirely too much power. And so it was that
Benjamin Franklin and other delegates to the Treaty of Paris in 1783
permitted the defeated British to legally call in all debts against
Virginia planters. These debts were enormous, and the crippling
effect on the ensconced planter elite was devastating. In those days,
debts passed from father to son and grandson. Among the most heavily
indebted of the planters was Richard Randolph of Curles. Those debts
caused many of the Randolph plantations to be laid upon the auction
block--including Presquile.
Just prior to the turn of the 19th
century, Davies and Molly left their plantation, never to return to
that life. Instead they took up life in the rapidly growing urban
center of Richmond. They built a fine house in the heart of the city
and named it “Moldavia” after their nicknames. Davies earned
income not only from his various enterprises, but also from his
political office of US Marshall. However, with the end of Federalist
domination in Washington, and the election of Jefferson, Davies lost
his post. The continuing drain of his father's pre-war debt left
David Meade Randolph all but impoverished. Taking advantage of the
newly liberal atmosphere, Mary Randolph had created a Boarding House
at Moldavia as soon as they had arrived in Richmond. While Davies
fortunes sank, hers rose, and they rose largely on her management
skills and her reputation as an ingenious cook. Molly's reputation
spread, and society soon came to dine at her boarding house. Her
business, it appears, kept the Randolphs in the center of Richmond's
elite circle. There is an apocryphal story that when the slave
Gabriel fomented his plot for a massive slave revolt in Richmond in
1800, that he ordered all whites in the city killed except Mary
Randolph. She was to be spared if she would agree to be his wife and
queen in a new regime.
Was Mary Randolph's influence and
success simply a result of some elusive qualities, like "feminine
charm" and "grace". I don't think so. I believe that
Mary was as much a product of the Enlightenment period as was her
husband. That period was dedicated to the idea that humanity was
central, that the application of effort and systematic inquiry would
yield knowledge, and knowledge would yield success in all human
ventures. This was the age of the dawn of modern science and modern
business alike. Let me read from Mary Randolph's preface to her book,
The Virginia Housewife.
The
difficulties I encountered when I first entered on the duties of a
House-Keeping life, from the want of books sufficiently clear and
concise, to impart knowledge to a Tyro, compelled me to study the
subject, and by actual experiment, to reduce every thing, in the
culinary line, to proper weights and measures...The government of a
family bears a Liliputian resemblance to the government of a nation.
The contents of the treasury must be known...A regular system must be
introduced into each department...The grand arcanum of management
lies in three simple rules: “Let every thing be done at the proper
time, keep every thing in its proper place, and put every thing to
its proper use.”
On the title page of her fine cook
book, Mary Randolph had the publisher print an aphorism: “Method is
the Soul of Management.” Mrs. Randolph’s preface stresses the
notion that method and management are the sole of housewifery, a
surprisingly modern concept expressed in language that almost
presages the “scientific” cooking school that came to dominate
American cookery at the end of the 19th century. But Mrs. Randolph’s
rationalism is not a product of late modernity, of industrialism, but
of its dawning in the Enlightenment. Enlightenment values permeate
Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife in the subtleties of
careful measurements which, the author assures us, she has refined
through continual experimentation. This notion of rational order and
method as the proper pathway to success in any complex enterprise is
very much the same notion that led to so many political, scientific
and entrepreneurial successes in the late 18th- and early
19th-century period. Remember, Mary Randolph had many
years of experience helping to manage a large commercial farm,
staffed by slave labor. She then ran a highly successful boarding
house and restaurant, not only enabling her to maintain her household
against the loss of her husband's estate, but also against the loss
of her husband, for she outlived Davies by many years. Eventually she
remarried--her new husband was George Washington Parke Custis. Mary
left Richmond and moved to live with Custis at his home, Arlington,
in Washington, D.C. There I suspect she became familiar with another
cookery manuscript well known to Virginia's culinary historians. It
is often called the Martha Washington cookbook or something similar
and is associated with the Custis family.
It is to the benefit of all succeeding
generations that she decided to commit her own recipes and some
cookery notes to a publication. Her book The Virginia Housewife
was published in 1824, when Mary was 70 years old. It contains many
recipes virtually unchanged from the traditional English cookery
represented in the Curles manuscript and in the Martha Washington
book. But it also contains much, much more. Here we find many
recipes that are purely American, based on American ingredients and
prepared in ways that indicate centuries of creolized cultural
practices. Her ingredients include corn, hominy, rice, squashes,
chili peppers, and other staples of southern cooking. Recipes for
johnny cakes, buckwheat cakes, cornbread and other commonplaces of
our culture stand alongside the most sumptuously spiced creations
tinged with European, East Indian, and Caribbean flavors and
techniques. The Virginia Housewife reveals the unique touches
of a talented and creative cook. This individual genius comes through
loud and clear and proclaims a very different era in cookery books.
No longer are ancient “receipts” faithfully copied for the
transmission of a cultural model that stretches back to the
Medieval period. Here, instead, is a combination of brand-new
creations with the old, tried-and-true ways transformed
through an individual vision. And the old includes not only the
academic, accepted “English” heritage, but the folk or country
creole recipes passed through oral, living tradition rather than
through meticulously copied canonical texts. It is easy to detect the
strong influences of Native America and African America in Mary
Randolph's world.
Mary Randolph was no housewife.
Certainly not in the traditional sense conveyed, for instance, in
Richard Bradley’s The Country Housewife published a century
before Mary Randolph’s book. Mary did not raise a family, and
despite her plantation upbringing and the bucolic beginnings of her
married life to Virginia’s “best farmer” --and I have little
doubt that her management skills and creative efforts lent
much to the success of that farm--she eschewed the role of
home-maker. While working within the realm of the “domestic,” it
is clear that Mary Randolph’s activities, like those of her
husband, were primarily entrepreneurial. There is no hint in the
meager documents of her life that she simply wielded her skills at
cookery and hospitality to hold onto the fading glories of elite
society; rather, she seems a person engaged, like a great many others
of her age, in the New Republic, in finding a way to turn her
individual skills and efforts into a comfortable living. No longer
content with the pre-ordained quarter of life carved out in the
traditional plantation-culture landscape, Mary Randolph embraced both
the Enlightenment and the Revolution and promises of individual
accomplishment.
Mary Randolph's is the oldest known
grave at Arlington Cemetery. She died four years after the appearance
of the first edition of The Virginia Housewife. Her epitaph
tells us: “her intrinsic worth needs no eulogium.” Her book has
been republished dozens of times. There are untold numbers of
completely pirated editions put out under other names. The
Virginia Housewife has never gone out of print, nor, in my mind,
should it. I have cooked recipes from the book, and I can vouch that
Mary Randolph was a genius at cookery, but she was more than that.
Along with others in the urban society of post-Revolutionary
Richmond, she embraced the liberty and pride of her American, creole
heritage, and the place her new country’s status made for her in a
world order of nations tied by diplomacy, trade, and cultural
exchange. Born a colonial, Mary Randolph lived to help create, and
enjoy, her own liberty, and that is what characterizes best the
"Other Revolution."
